Must absolutist states resort to intimidation and coercion to tackle subjects’ disobedience driven by their pursuit of reputation? Since canonical early modern Western thinkers broached but did not solve this question, I turn to the most renowned ancient Chinese Legalist Han Feizi’s understudied account of reputation for answers. Whether as a means or an end, individuals’ pursuit of reputation always challenges the authority of the absolute monarchy that endeavors to centralize state power. Forcefully confronting this pursuit is the barely but only acceptable way for the state to tackle this challenge, as non-confrontational strategies favored by many Western thinkers inevitably fail due to their incompatibility with the logic of political absolutism. Thus, Han Feizi unwittingly exposes the tension between political absolutism and reputation. This exposure adds nuances to his view of human nature and helps us understand how individuals’ morally ambiguous pursuit of reputation obstructs the centralization of state power.

This article challenges the common assumption that the partisan identification of bureaucratic elites is fixed over time. Building on principal-agent and organization theory, we hypothesize that bureaucratic elites may respond to political turnover by adjusting their partisan identification toward that of their (new) elected principals. We test this prediction using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP) over the 1964–2008 period, which allows us to study the same US agency leaders (N=951 individuals) before and after partisan shifts in their agency’s elected principals. We find significant evidence that agency leaders remaining in office following a shift in the party in power on average reorient their partisan identity in response to such turnover events. These adjustments are stronger for agency leaders directly appointed by, or in more frequent contact with, their elected principals. Our results suggest a malleability of partisanship seldom attributed to bureaucratic elites in public and academic discourse.

Studies have found that women’s representation is more likely to spike after corruption scandals. However, the mechanism underlying this increase remains unclear: are parties more likely to nominate women after corruption scandals, are voters more likely to support women candidates, or is it a combination of both? Using an original dataset of audit results and the gender of 47,000 candidates running in over 10,000 mayoral elections in Mexico (2000–2019), we find that voters drive the effect. While political parties are not more likely to nominate women as candidates in municipalities with recent revelations of spending irregularities, women candidates are more likely to win elections after corruption is uncovered. In contrast to previous studies, which expect strategic parties to be behind the increases in women’s representation following corruption scandals, our findings underscore that increases in women’s representation can happen despite parties and not because of parties.

Many political scientists hold that vitriolic speech against high-profile women has only negligible effects on other women in politics. They also contend that the prevalence of such vitriol is consistent with gender bias having no significant negative impact on most women in politics. This article argues that these sanguine positions rest on inadequate and untested assumptions regarding misogyny, and the role it plays in politics. In the service of putting us in a position to test the relationship between gendered discourse in particular elections and the structural obstacles faced by women in politics, this article develops a conceptualization of political misogyny: nasty claim-making that instills repugnant connotations into women’s collective political identities (e.g., their partisan identities). Attention is also paid to how political misogyny can distribute hatred burdens disproportionately among different groups of women.

Introducing an international relations perspective into the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, we hypothesize that immigrants from rival countries will be shunned and immigrants from allied countries preferred, especially by respondents who identify more strongly with the nation. We fielded a forced-choice conjoint experiment in 22 countries, whereby respondents chose between applicants for permanent resident status with randomized attributes. We identified rival and allied countries of origin for each surveyed country, with one such pair sharing a similar racial and cultural make-up as the majority of respondents, and one pair being more dissimilar. We find that discrimination against immigrants from rival states is so pronounced that it results in a net preference for racially and culturally dissimilar immigrants. Since we fielded the surveys amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are able to leverage exogenous changes in the intensity of one rivalry, providing further evidence for the proposed mechanism.

Plea bargaining figures heavily in criminal justice systems in the United States and, increasingly, around the globe. Conventional wisdom holds that plea bargaining generates efficiency gains for all parties, while sorting the guilty from the innocent. We build a series of formal models to consider the relationship between a defendant’s guilt and her likelihood of pleading guilty. In an inversion of the conventional wisdom, we show that under a range of empirically plausible scenarios—for example, if criminals are more risk-seeking than the wrongfully accused, or if prosecutors derive a career benefit from trial wins—the innocent are more likely than the guilty to plea bargain.

A long-standing debate in political psychology considers whether individuals update their beliefs and attitudes in the direction of evidence or grow more confident in their convictions when confronted with counter-attitudinal arguments. Though recent studies have shown that instances of the latter tendency, which scholars have termed attitude polarization and “belief backfire,” are rarely observed in settings involving hot-button issues or viral misinformation, we know surprisingly little about how participants respond to information targeting deeply held attitudes, a key condition for triggering attitude polarization. We develop a tailored experimental design that measures participants’ core issue positions and exposes them to personalized counter-attitudinal information using the large language model GPT-3. We find credible evidence of attitude polarization, but only when arguments are contentious and vitriolic. For lower valence counter-attitudinal arguments, attitude polarization is not detected. We conclude by discussing implications for the study of political cognition and the measurement of attitudes.

I draw together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, I ask how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. I demonstrate that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not. Despite partisan differences, respondents evaluate promise-keeping when asked about accountability but not when asked about approval. Thus, even when voters recognize broken promises, accountability is influenced by partisanship. Immigration, a more polarized issue, is more likely to prime a partisan response than human trafficking, a less polarized issue. Future work must account for partisanship in accountability and what this means for our understanding of fundamental democratic principles.

Vigilante violence, often targeting religious and sectarian minorities and preceded by unsubstantiated rumors, has taken the lives of many citizens in India and Pakistan in recent years. Despite its horrific nature, such vigilantism receives popular support. Can reducing the credibility of rumors via corrections decrease support for vigilantism? To answer this question, we field simultaneous, in-person experiments in Punjab, Pakistan, and Uttar Pradesh, India, regions where anti-minority vigilantism has been preceded by misinformation. We find that correcting rumors reduces support for vigilantism and increases the desire to hold vigilantes accountable. This effect is not attenuated by prior distrust toward out-groups. By contrast, information about state and elite behavior does not always shape attitudes toward vigilantism. These findings provide evidence that support for vigilantism can be reduced through the dissemination of credible information, even in polarized settings.

This article presents Latinx political thought as a distinctive tradition in political theory that reworks central concepts in response to historical experiences of conquest, colonialism, migration, and transnational politics. In reconstructing this tradition, we argue that its problem space converges with US-based Latin American political thought. The article first traces a genealogy of Latinx political theory and then explores three realms of theorizing around which Latinx and Latin American political thought cluster: sovereignty and state violence, peoplehood, and transnationalism. We explain how the surveyed works disrupt and enrich political theory accounts of these problems. In arguing for the recognition of this field as a tradition, the article also aims to make it intelligible as an area of concentration for PhD students in political science.

Social scientists often classify text documents to use the resulting labels as an outcome or a predictor in empirical research. Automated text classification has become a standard tool since it requires less human coding. However, scholars still need many human-labeled documents for training. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a new algorithm for text classification that combines a probabilistic model with active learning. The probabilistic model uses both labeled and unlabeled data, and active learning concentrates labeling efforts on difficult documents to classify. Our validation study shows that with few labeled data, the classification performance of our algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the computational cost. We replicate the results of two published articles with only a small fraction of the original labeled data used in those studies and provide open-source software to implement our method.

Are federal lawsuits resolved differently based on the race or gender of the judges assigned to hear them? Recent empirical research posits that women and judges of color decide cases more liberally, at least in some identity-salient areas of law. However, these studies analyze small numbers of cases and judges, and use research designs that limit their causal interpretations. Using an original dataset of all civil rights cases filed in 20 federal district courts over multiple decades and a strong causal identification strategy, we find that assignment of cases to judges of color or women has no statistically significant effect on case outcomes among Democratic appointees. However, it causes more conservative outcomes among Republican appointees. We explain these results with a theory of bargaining over judicial appointments in which Republican presidents take advantage of Democrats’ preference for diversity on the bench to appoint more conservative judges.

Although commentators often point to the political value of legislators’ geographic ties, less is known about the influence of such connections once in office. Given recent scholarship underscoring the importance of geography as a dimension of identity, we argue that local legislators should behave as descriptive representatives. We collect the hometowns of all members of Congress with known birth locations from 1789 to 2020 to analyze how being born near one’s district impacts legislator behavior. We connect these data to information on a series of behaviors, finding that local legislators emphasize constituency work over policymaking and party-building. Moreover, while local legislators do not demonstrate substantively less partisan unity in roll-call voting, they attract a higher percentage of out-party cosponsors to their bills. Together, our results point to important representational implications regarding the geographic roots of legislators and the role of local connections in the contemporary Congress.

Political leaders increasingly use social media to speak directly to voters, but the extent to which elite cues shape offline political behavior remains unclear. In this article, we study the effects of elite cues on noncompliant behavior, focusing on a series of controversial tweets sent by US President Donald Trump calling for the “liberation” of Minnesota, Virginia, and Michigan from state and local government COVID-19 restrictions. Leveraging the fact that Trump’s messages exclusively referred to three specific US states, we adopt a generalized difference-in-differences design relying on spatial variation to identify the causal effects of the targeted cues. Our analysis shows that the President’s messages led to an increase in movement, a decrease in adherence to stay-at-home restrictions, and an increase in arrests of white Americans for crimes related to civil disobedience and rebellion. These findings demonstrate the consequences of elite cues in polarized environments.

Many theorists believe ideals of deliberation realize democratic equality by ensuring each speaker’s influence is commensurate with the strength of the reasons they give. This article argues that view is incomplete. When the frames, interpretations, and concepts speakers bring into debate disproportionately reflect the perspectives of socially advantaged groups, they contribute to hermeneutic injustices that impede marginalized citizens’ voice even under the most favorable deliberative rules. In response, I describe the role institutions of mass communication play in shaping the epistemic resources available to deliberators and show how structural biases toward advantaged groups within those institutions generate shared understandings that undermine deliberation’s egalitarian potential. Pursuing democratic equality, then, requires not only the fair exchange of reasons but also proactive efforts to identify and correct institutional mechanisms of hermeneutic injustice.

How does the extent of policy benefits—not simply their presence—affect political engagement? While fundamental to understanding the electoral implications of economic policymaking, addressing this question is challenging due to the difficulty of measuring individual voters’ policy outcomes. We examine a natural experiment embedded in President Trump’s Market Facilitation Program (MFP), which aided a core Republican constituency: farmers harmed by his 2018 trade war. Due to idiosyncrasies of program design, the MFP undercompensated some farmers for their trade war losses—and significantly overcompensated others—based solely on their 2018 crop portfolios. Analyzing over 165,000 affected voters, we show that improved compensation outcomes had negligible impacts on Republican farmers’ midterm turnout and campaign contributions, even though such variation in benefits significantly affected farmers’ propensity to view the intervention as helpful. This null result is important—our estimates suggest that even highly salient variation in policy outcomes may have limited mobilizing capacity.

American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data—content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers—we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of nonconventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.

In the mid-nineteenth century—even as many European liberals took a “turn to empire”—Mexican President Benito Juárez and his supporters enunciated an anti-imperial, liberal vision for international politics. In the context of the French intervention, Mexican liberals rejected claims that Europe’s material progress conferred upon the continent a “civilizing mission” vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Reconfiguring liberal and republican scripts, juaristas proposed an order legitimated by popular sovereignty and based on equality among states, non-intervention, and republican fraternity. This article situates juarista liberal internationalism in its historical context and in light of recent debates over liberalism’s longstanding entanglements with empire. By uncovering this overlooked strand of anti-imperial liberalism from the periphery, this article helps to decenter debates on liberal political thought and liberalism’s international implications. The juaristas’ rejoinder, we argue, should be integral to constructing a more pluralist and global understanding of the lineages of liberal internationalism.

Recruiting a large number of ground workers is crucial for running effective modern election campaigns. It is unclear if party leaders can influence the quality and quantity of the unpaid rank-and-file workforce as they can with prized nominations for candidates. We analyze a field experiment conducted by an Indian party that randomized recruitment messages reaching 1% of a 13-million-person electorate to join its rank and file. Contrary to concerns that parties can only attract a few poor-quality volunteers, we show that elite efforts can shape the rank and file. In fact, specific strategies can increase the size, enhance the gender and ethnic diversity, and broaden the education and political skills of recruits. Strategies that signal gender inclusiveness have a lasting impact on some dimensions up to 3 years later. Taken together, this article provides the first causal evidence that rank-and-file recruitment is an opportunity for elites to influence long-term party development.